Let Your Heart Relish the Return of Spring

Image by Aaron Burden

Looking out of my study window, it’s a beautiful sunny morning. Birds sing. A few fluffy white clouds drift across the piercing blue sky. It’s still mid-February and I know we’re not quite there yet, but you can feel spring in your bones on a day like this. After a long, chilly winter, I think we’re all ready for the warm, light, hopeful days that are just around the corner.

It feels especially poignant for me, emerging from the fog of Covid after a grim couple of weeks. I feel, mostly, human again and am relishing the small, taken-for-granted pleasures of life. A whole night without coughing. Enjoying my morning coffee without it irritating my throat, leading to, you guessed it, more coughing. A short, gentle workout. So simple, yet blissful. Like my inner spring after two long weeks of winter.

Something I often work on with my clients is how to notice and appreciate the many joys of life, as well as the tough times. My recent post on gratitude offered some evidence-based ways to do that, but this one is about balance, allowing yourself to feel and experience whatever may be true for you, moment to moment. Good and bad, light and shade, winter and spring. It’s all part of the natural flow of your life.

The rainbow of emotions

One of my favourite metaphors for this experience of mindfulness, of aliveness, is the rainbow of emotions. So think of your emotions like a rainbow, ranging from dark colours on one side (sadness, hurt, fear, anger, grief, loneliness, shame) to light on the other (joy, love, excitement, pleasure, pride, satisfaction). In order to live a rich, meaningful human life we need to feel the full rainbow, from the dark stuff that no-one likes to the lighter shades we all prefer.

And what I notice in almost everyone I work with (as well as myself) is that the experience of trauma in childhood makes us overly focused on those dark shades. We may not like these painful emotions, but we spend a disproportionate amount of time feeling them, worrying and ruminating about painful experiences, laser-focused on everything that’s bad, problematic, hurtful or threatening in some way.

And this is normal, because trauma skews our thoughts, perceptions and emotional states. It dysregulates our nervous system, making us highly prone/sensitive to threat-focused emotions like anger and anxiety. It affects our memory systems, making it much easier to remember painful, destructive experiences and harder to recall – or feel – the many good things in our lives. And a central task of healing from trauma is to be more balanced – feeling, processing and healing from the bad stuff, of course, but also enjoying, thinking about and becoming more receptive to the good.

Enjoy your inner spring

To make this concrete, I have two tasks for you. First, please start a journal, if you don’t write one already. And in your journal I want you to note every sign of spring, wherever you are in the world (if you’re in the Southern hemisphere, this won’t work so well for you, so skip this one and go for the meditation practice, below). This could be species of birds returning to your garden or local green space. It might be dear little snowdrops peeking out of the frosty soil, crocuses, daffodils and other hardy souls braving the chilly mornings.

Notice the sun rising a little earlier each day, and setting a few minutes later. Feel the increasing warmth of sunlight on your skin, as the sun regains its life-giving power. One of the most joyful sights for those in the country is the arrival of lambs, bouncing and frolicking across the fields. If that’s you, drink in every delicious, life-affirming moment.

And as you notice and focus on every sign of spring, see if you can also notice a gradual uplift in your mood. Remember that, despite our increasingly high-tech, urban lives we are still animals, creatures of this Earth, responding to subtle changes in the seasons as much as the migrating birds or dormice emerging sleepily from their winter nests. Just as our mood naturally dips in winter, so it lifts in spring. Notice, maximise and enjoy that, as much as possible.

Task two is to try my Insight Timer practice – Taking in the Good: IFS Meditation. It’s all about gradually changing a negative mindset, choosing a positive self-belief, feeling and quality to embody and bring into your life.

I hope you enjoy it – sending you hopeful love and warm thoughts ❤️

Dan

What Are Your 10,000 Joys and 10,000 Sorrows?

Image by Madison Oren

There is an oft-quoted Taoist saying that every human life contains 10,000 joys and 10,000 sorrows. Meaning, it’s human to suffer, to struggle with painful emotions like sadness, loneliness or anxiety. But it’s also inherently human to experience positive feelings like joy, pleasure, happiness, love and pride. A rich, well-lived human life involves experiencing – and allowing ourselves to truly feel – all of our feelings, both pleasant and unpleasant.

As this is my last post of 2023, I am in a reflective mood, looking back over the past year and digesting everything that has happened, both good and bad. I also spend a lot (too much, according to my loved ones!) of time thinking about my 56 years of life on this planet, all the things I have experienced, that shaped me, that made me, me. And this reflective process can be a double-edged sword, as when I’m feeling a bit down, it can easily turn into a self-critical rumination, my Inner Critic reminding me about all the things I have said or done that I feel bad about in some way. Not helpful.

But on more balanced days, I can also remember moments of great joy. I had lunch with a dear friend recently and she asked me what skydiving was like (I tried skydiving back in my journalist days, when I would go on crazy adventures and then write about them). I did a tandem skydive and remember it with crystal clarity – the sheer terror of jumping out of a plane at 12,000 feet, plummeting towards Earth at lunatic speed and every cell in my body screaming, ‘We’re going to die!’

And then, my instructor pulled the rip cord and all that plummeting terror instantly stopped as we floated slowly towards the ground, silently circling above the stunning Oxfordshire landscape of verdant hills, fields and woodland. It was the closest I have ever come to flying and it was… blissful. I can still taste the sheer joy (and relief at the knowledge I was not actually going to die!), the visceral sense of freedom and in-your-bones wonder and beauty of that experience. Magical.

The practice: Focus on your joys

So here’s a little assignment for you over the Christmas break – try journalling about the 10,000 joys and sorrows of your life. If you’re like me, and most people who struggle with their mental health at times, it’s a good idea to just bullet-point the sorrows, without going into too much depth. And definitely don’t try and think of 10,000! Just do a timeline of the big, tricky stuff in your life, with a sentence or two for each.

That’s because every human brain has a built-in negativity bias, so we focus on anything that could be threatening – painful memories, worries about the future, problems in our life – in great detail, while only giving fleeting attention to the good stuff that happens all the time. It comes and goes, without sticking in your mind and brain.

Then spend a lot more time on your 10,000 joys, even if it’s hard to think of many. As with all of the practices I recommend, there is no right or wrong way of doing this, just have a go and see what happens. And remember that the more we focus on good stuff – happy memories, moments of triumph or achievement, kind words or gestures from friends and loved ones, the birth of a child or first kiss with a beloved – the more we correct that negativity bias. We start to focus more on good, pleasant or enjoyable experiences, moment to moment and day to day, which over time rewires our brain to think about and feel those things more deeply.

And if you would like help with this rewiring process and focusing more on the joys, try my Hardwiring Happiness: Talk & Meditation practice on Insight Timer. It’s based on a brilliantly simple practice by Rick Hanson, from his book Hardwiring Happiness: How to Reshape Your Brain and Your Life. I love this practice and use it all the time with my clients, who seem to love it too. Just click on the button below to try it now.

I hope that helps. And I hope you have a wonderful, restful, restorative break over the festive season. Thank you so much for your support, connection, comments and kindness throughout 2023, in response to my teaching, to my Insight Timer practices, through my various social-media channels and via email – I am so grateful and deeply appreciate every one of you.

I have some exciting plans for 2024, including my first-ever 7-day course for Insight Timer, so stay tuned to these posts for more details about that and other upcoming events in the year ahead.

Sending you love and warm thoughts ❤️

Dan

How to Generate Feelings of Gratitude, Even When You’re Struggling

Image by Taylor Deas-Melesh

I must confess, I have a complicated relationship with social media. In some ways, I like platforms like Instagram and the newly-launched Threads because they offer an unparalleled way to communicate with millions of people, all over the world. If you’re someone like me, who combines trying to help people with having lots of ideas and wanting to share them, social media is great. I also like how powerful it has been at de-stigmatising mental-health issues like chronic anxiety and depression. That’s a wonderful thing.

But I don’t like how addictive it is. I struggle to manage my screen time and social media consumption – and of course, neither of those things is an accident. Read Johann Hari’s brilliant Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention if you want to understand the way Big Tech has knowingly and systematically made us all addicted to tech. Having given up my other vices, this is one I still struggle with, which is kind of frustrating given how much I know about addiction and how to overcome it.

I also don’t like being bombarded with well-meaning but saccharine messages all the time, especially on Instagram. When I see yet another post telling me to ‘Think positive!’ or ‘Smile! It’s another beautiful day!’ I think to myself, That’s all very well, but have you ever been depressed? Do you know how hard it is to stop ruminating, beating yourself up or seeing nothing but bad in the world when you’re down?

If you have ever been depressed, you will know exactly what I mean. It’s like your mind is stuck in an endless loop of negativity, hopelessness and gloom. Someone telling you to ‘Think positive!’ is like telling an angry person to ‘Just calm down.’ Neither helpful nor possible.

Why gratitude helps, even when it’s hard

But that doesn’t mean we should forget about trying to be grateful, even if those feelings are really hard to generate. Why? Because extensive research shows how helpful gratitude can be for a whole host of mental-health problems, including depression. And, as I often say in these posts, our newfound discoveries in Western psychology are not exactly new. Generating gratitude has been a cornerstone Buddhist practice for 2,500 years, along with fostering other positive mental states such as compassion, loving-kindness, equanimity and happiness.

Again, I am not underestimating how hard it can be to generate gratitude for your life, especially if you are struggling with depression. I have been there myself and know how tough that can be. But I also know how helpful gratitude is for me, day to day, especially if I’m feeling a bit low or struggling to find reasons for optimism.

To make this a bit more concrete, here are some simple steps you can try if you would like to generate some gratitude…

The practice: finding reasons to be grateful

1. Remember that nothing is too small. If we are struggling to generate gratitude, we may be trying too hard and thinking we have to grateful for big, shiny things like a gorgeous new girlfriend or landing our dream job. These things don’t happen to most of us, most of the time, so it’s better to focus on small, everyday things.

   Sometimes, when I’m walking to the office and feeling a bit down, I work on feeling grateful for the things we mostly take for granted. I am so grateful for having enough nutritious food to eat today, unlike billions of people in the world, I think. I feel gratitude for living in a country that is not at war. No bombs fell on my street in the night. My family is safe and can go about their lives in peace. I’m grateful to have a warm, dry place to live, clothes to wear, just being able to walk along this pavement and spend my day mostly healthy and free from pain.

   There is so much to be grateful for if we just stop, look around at our lives and notice all the small, wonderful things we mostly ignore.

2. Keep a gratitude journal. This is a key positive-psychology technique that research consistently finds to be helpful for our mental health and wellbeing. At the end of each day, write in your journal, finding up to five things to be grateful for from your day. It could be small things, like eating a delicious peach. Or big things, like getting good grades for an exam, having a family member recover from surgery, or watching your baby take their first steps. Big stuff gives us more of a dopamine hit, of course, but small things work just fine.

   Here’s a step-by-step guide from the excellent Greater Good Science Center.

3. Give voice to the good stuff too. How often do we end our day grumbling to our partner or family member about all the bad stuff that’s happened to us? (Guilty as charged – sorry Laura). And that’s fine, of course – we need to vent and get stuff off our chests, there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s just that our version of the day can be skewed to the negative. Because our brains have an in-built negativity bias, we tend to be laser-focused on things that are hurtful, upsetting, scary or worrying. That’s just how your brain has evolved, to keep you safe by scanning for bad stuff all the time.

   Once you have vented, try to find five things you are grateful about, as in step 2. Tell your partner, friend, family member or therapist all about them. If you’re speaking to a partner, it’s extremely helpful if you can find at least one thing about them you are grateful for. This is an important tip from renowned relationship expert John Gottman, who says the magic ratio with your partner is five to one of positive/negative feelings and actions.

Give these steps a try for one month and I am confident they will have a beneficial impact on your mood, outlook and sense of wellbeing.

Sending you love and warm thoughts ❤️

Dan

What Can Buddhism Teach Us About How to Live a Good Life?

Image by Jamie Street

Many of us in the West assume that Buddhism is mostly about mindfulness. That’s because, in the 1970s, mindfulness entered the Western medical mainstream as an eight-week programme: mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR). From there, interest in mindfulness snowballed until, today, we have mindfulness programmes in schools, prisons, hospitals, corporations – even the House of Commons!

And this is a wonderful thing – mindfulness has a host of benefits for our mental and physical health, so the more people incorporating it into their daily lives the better. It’s just that mindfulness, and meditation more widely, is just a tiny fraction of Buddhist teaching, practice and psychology. In fact, Buddhist teaching is mostly about how to live your life, rather than how to sit on a cushion.

As someone who has long been fascinated by Buddhism, I was intrigued by this idea – that there might be a set of guidelines about how to live a good life. And not just for monks and nuns – who have incredibly complex guidelines about how to live – but for a layperson like me.

I try to live my life according to these Buddhist ‘precepts’, which are very much guidelines, rather than strict rules. That speaks to me, because I don’t much like organised religion, the idea that this or that action is sinful and will be punished, or virtuous and will be rewarded by everlasting heavenly bliss.

Remember that the Buddha was primarily a teacher and psychologist, who offered his insights into how to free ourselves from suffering. And living by these precepts is a key part of that – so here they are…

The five precepts

1. To abstain from taking life

2. To abstain from taking what is not given

3. To abstain from sensuous misconduct

4. To abstain from false speech

5. To abstain from intoxicants as tending to cloud the mind

Let’s break these down, one by one. First, the Buddha taught that we should avoid taking life – in fact, we should not kill any ‘sentient’ being. This obviously means not killing any other human, but there is a great deal of debate about what sentient means and how far we should take it. Personally, this precept is a big part of my being vegetarian, because I don’t like to kill any other being – not cows, pigs, sheep or fish, but also ants, wasps and other pesky creatures. How you interpret this one is up to you, but given the climate emergency and ecological crisis, it certainly seems helpful to avoid harming living things wherever possible.

The second precept seems fairly simple – it basically means don’t steal. But it also means not cheating on your taxes, or exploiting other people’s generosity. If it’s not given to you freely, it’s best not to take it.

Precept three is all about sex – sensuous meaning sexual. So of course we should never assault, harass or harm anyone sexually. But I think this also speaks to not having affairs, using pornography, or otherwise letting your sexual desire lead you into taking unkind or un-compassionate action.

The fourth precept essentially means don’t lie. But this is more subtle, as it also means speaking the truth wherever possible – unless it means hurting another person. Sometimes it’s best to stay silent, or hold information back until someone is ready for it. So, as with all the precepts, it takes a bit of thought and is subtle and sophisticated, rather than a black-and-white ‘do this’ and ‘don’t do that’. You kind of have to figure it out for yourself.

Finally, precept five is all about drugs and alcohol – don’t misuse them, of course, but also don’t ingest anything that will make you mindless, as opposed to mindful. Remember that the Buddha taught we should aspire to being mindful all the time. When walking, eating, drinking, talking, thinking, using the toilet, working, watching a movie, and so on. All the time. So ingesting a substance that interferes with that ability is not helpful.

Advice for non-Buddhists

Let me be clear here – I’m not trying to convert you to Buddhism! These precepts are just as helpful for Christians, Muslims and atheists as they are for Buddhists. They are simply suggestions about how to live a good life, which causes you and other living beings as little suffering as possible. Feel free to follow all of them, or none. And if you do follow them, remember they are not strict rules, but guidelines that you can adapt to suit yourself and your situation.

For example, you may love meat as part of your diet. If so, perhaps you could reduce the amount of meat you eat and buy organic chicken, say, instead of battery-farmed chicken. That will cause a great deal less suffering to the chicken you’re about to stick in your oven!

You don’t need to be a monk, or live a perfect life. Just do as much good as you can and that will make a huge difference, to you and the rest of the world.

And I hope you find these ideas as helpful as I have.

May you be well

May you be happy

May you be free from suffering

Dan

Seek Out Moments of Beauty in Your Day

Image by Arno Smit

It may be freezing cold in London today, but spring is finally here. I know this, despite still wearing my winter-coat-hat-scarf-gloves combo, because of the blossom. Every afternoon, when I have a break between sessions, I take a long walk around my neighbourhood – and today everywhere I looked, glorious, vibrant, soul-nourishing blossom was popping and fizzing into life.

This is my favourite time of year because after a long, cold, gloomy winter, spring brings a surge of life, hope and positivity. ‘We made it,’ I always think to myself. Another tough winter navigated, as well as possible, and now the reward is all this colour and life. Plants, birds, insects, squirrels – everything roaring back into life after winter’s semi-hibernation.

When it’s hard to see in colour

And the best time to find ways of draining every drop of joy from all this life is actually when it’s hardest – when you are struggling with low mood or even a full-blown depression. Because when you’re low, it can be hard even to see the colours around you, let alone enjoy them. So you have to train yourself, bit by bit, to seek out and savour moments of beauty in your day.

Of course, another word to describe this would be mindfulness – and ‘experiencing your experience’, as Buddhist teachers say, rather than living entirely in your head, is a key element of mindfulness practice and courses like MBSR or MBCT.

Here are some of these moments, from an average Wednesday in my little north London suburb:

• I just watched a video, on social media, about a boy who has suffered far too much for such a small person. When he was rushed into hospital with sepsis and pneumonia, they discovered a brain tumour, which they removed through surgery and radiotherapy. As he was getting treatment, his father died suddenly (I am not ashamed to say that my eyes were welling up at this point)

  But this kid – a passionate, lifelong Everton fan – was on a tour of the ground when he ‘accidentally’ bumped into the whole team, including his hero, the Everton/England goalkeeper Jordan Pickford. He was overwhelmed with emotion – as was I! But he soon recovered and was kicking a ball about with his heroes. Oh lord, just a beautiful thing – he will remember that day for the rest of his life

• Outside a shop near my office, I saw two small girls hugging tightly on their way home from school, not wanting to say goodbye – despite their parents’ sleeve-tugging encouragement. They just loved each other so much! The next school day was an eternity away, so they kept hugging, pressing their little cheeks together. I shared a smile with one of the parents. And it was quietly lovely

• I moved on to another shop, a little further along the road, where we buy our fruit and veg. It’s called Tony’s Continental and is a family-run place that’s at the heart of our little community – if you are ever in East Finchley I strongly recommend it! I haven’t been there for a while, for various reasons, but when I said hello to one of the owners, he greeted me with such warmth and friendliness

  We talked about football, as men do, but football was just a conduit for conversation and connection. We were saying, ‘It’s great to see you and hang out,’ in that safe, male kind of way that sports-talk provides. So simple. So nice

• And, of course, blossom! So many trees just starting to flower, smatterings of pink and white lining the street. Cherry, plum, blackthorn, forsythia, daffodils bobbing their little yellow heads… These pops of colour and reminders that Nature finds a way, even in the urban environment where I live and work, really make my heart sing

Not easy, but important

I know that if you are feeling down, moments like this may seem elusive – or even impossible to find right now. It’s not easy, I’m painfully aware of that from personal experience. But I also know that making an effort to seek out these moments of colour, of humanity, of beauty in your day is a powerful antidote to depression. 

It reminds us that we are alive. That there is always hope, if we allow it into our minds and hearts. That even if today is rough, tomorrow might be better.

I hope that helps, a little – and if you are struggling, sending you love and warm thoughts, wherever you are in the world,

Dan

What is the Secret to a Happy Life?

Image by Vonecia Carswell

Everybody wants to be happy, right? Me, you, that barista who served you coffee this morning and the homeless guy who looked so sad and lost on your way to work. It’s hard-wired into every human to avoid pain and seek pleasure – especially a consistent, lifelong feeling of happiness.

But the tricky thing is how? How do we learn to be, if not happy, then happier than we are right now? What if we struggle with mental-health problems and happiness seems like a distant mirage that fades every time we think it’s close? And what if we experienced significant trauma in our childhoods and so just leading a ‘normal’, functional life is a day-to-day struggle, let alone some fanciful notion of actually being happy?

I spend virtually every waking moment of my life pondering these questions. All I do is think, read, research, learn and practice with my clients (and myself, my friends and family) how to be happier. How to heal and recover from past traumas and childhood hurts. How to lift the mood of depression or calm the agitation of anxiety.

the search for happiness

One book, in particular, has stood out to me recently as I conduct this search. It’s The Good Life: Lessons From the World’s Longest Scientific Study of Happiness, by Robert Waldinger and Marc Schultz. Unlike many psychology books I read, it’s extremely well-written and highly readable. And it contains some genuinely transformative pearls of wisdom on what it takes to live a rich, meaningful and happy life.

The authors are the directors of the Harvard Study of Adult Development – a truly remarkable piece of research that has followed 724 men since they were teenagers in 1938. Approximately 60 of these men, now in their 90s, are still left. The Study chose two groups of men, one comprising Harvard students and the other from Boston’s most deprived neighbourhoods.

What’s so remarkable about this study is that it follows these men through their entire lives – from teenage years until, for many of them, those lives come to an end. And the researchers are able to glean a vast treasure trove of information about them, asking at regular intervals about every aspect of their health, day-to-day lives, their marriages, work, kids, views on life, coping strategies when times are hard…

This book is profoundly moving, because we hear the stories of these men, their triumphs and failures, greatest joys and toughest moments in their lives. We also hear from some of the 1,300 children of the original participants, who were later added to the project. It’s a brilliant book – I can’t recommend it highly enough.

And remember this is a study on what makes us happy. What constitutes a good life. Not just the things that make us sad, stressed or afraid.

So what does make us happy?

Having tracked all of these people, for so many years, the researchers found a few key ingredients that seemed to add up to a well-lived life, whatever their class, income level or occupation. Trying not to have any regrets was one ingredient, as was developing successful coping skills for the bumpy bits of life.

But the most important ingredient seems to be about other people – developing and maintaining warm relationships was the most important factor determining which of these Bostonians were happy and which less so. In some ways, this is common sense. We know that, for example, being in a warm, loving, mutually supportive romantic relationship makes us happy. And we know that having close friends makes us feel good in all sorts of ways.

But studies like these, as well as decades of research into attachment, give us cast-iron, empirical proof that loneliness is a real problem for our mental and physical health; that the kind of relationship we have with our parents hugely influences the relationships we forge as an adult; and that having close, positive relationships with friends, family, colleagues and others is the key to a happy life.

What if your relationships are not good?

We have to be careful with studies like these, because it’s easy to think, ‘Well, my relationships are awful. I maintain distance with my family, am single and struggle to make friendships, so am I doomed to unhappiness?’ And my answer would be no, not at all.

Many of us – myself included – have difficult relationships with family members. You may also find friendships difficult, perhaps only having one or two good friends, or finding social situations hard to navigate. You may not have a partner, which is a source of ongoing sadness for you.

If so, please don’t despair. We live in the 21st century and there are many ways of living a good life that don’t involve marriage or children, let alone a wide network of friends.

But it’s helpful to remember that humans are social, tribal animals. Our brains are wired (indeed, primarily developed) for attachment, connection, relationship.

So if your relationships currently make you unhappy, please do get some good-quality therapy to help you cut loose those people who make you feel bad and find new people who light you up, or make you feel safe, or who just get you and accept you for who you are.

We can all do that, at any age and life stage. As I’m always saying in these posts, It’s never too much and never too late to heal. That applies to relationships too.

So please read the book, I’m confident you will enjoy it. And I wish you strength, courage and determination on your road to happiness, however long it may be.

Sending love and warm thoughts,

Dan